What Is Lettuce Water Sleep And Does It Work
Everyone knows that getting their daily dose of fruits and vegetables is essential for leading a healthy, full life. But what if certain vegetables could actually help you sleep better? One such belief is that lettuce water actually has sleep-inducing benefits and may ease certain insomnia symptoms.
But with millions of people suffering from insomnia, is it possible that lettuce water could be the key to unlocking blissful, quality sleep? Keep reading as we explore this question and others about what lettuce water is and what affects it has on sleep.
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The Lettuce Water Wrap Up
Try Modified Lettuce Tea
Lettuce tea is different from lettuce water, in that there is one extra step, and an added ingredient.
To make lettuce tea, you should boil and filter the lettuce water first, and then add a teabag.
The addition of the tea really does nothing other than making the lettuce water more palatable.
However, if you are interested in giving lettuce tea a go, I recommend making a few minor modifications to improve its sleep-inducing properties.
Add Magnolia
Magnolia is a natural sleep aid.
It contains honokiol and magnolol, which are known to promote sleep in humans.
The dried bark, buds, and stems can be added to your lettuce water to make Magnolia-lettuce tea.
These polyphenolic components will improve your sleep whether lettuce water has any action or not.
Add Chamomile
Chamomile has a delicate flavor, and has been used as a sleep aid for many years.
It is my favorite go-to sleep potion.
Adding chamomile to lettuce water serves two purposes.
Firstly, it will mask the salad-y flavor of the lettuce water.
Secondly, chamomile may complement the action of lettuce, or it will bring on sleep and relaxation by itself.
Its a win-win situation.
Add Lavender
Lavender-lettuce tea is made by adding a few buds of lavender into prepared lettuce water.
This creates a violet-purple brew with a flavor and aroma very distinct from either parent component.
Lavender is known and proven to induce relaxation and sleep.
However, do not consume lavender essential oil, as it is highly toxic.
Can Drinking Lettuce Water Be Harmful
If you want to keep sipping lettuce water, boil away, Dr. Martin said. Other than the fact that it probably doesnt taste very good, the drink is unlikely to cause any negative health effects. The only downside may be that chugging a lot of liquid before bed may mean more trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Dr. Martin typically recommends that people stop drinking fluids about an hour before they go to bed.
There are countless supposed miracle cures out there, Dr. Drerup said, but developing good habits for improved sleep, like keeping bed times consistent, avoiding too much screen time at night and limiting alcohol consumption, are better ways to set yourself up for a successful slumber.
Dr. Drerup said shes not surprised, however, something like lettuce water has made its way across the internet. It highlights the extent to which people will try to find a quick solution to improve sleep, she said.
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Food5 Foods Thatll Help You Sleep Better And 6 To Avoid
Cassetty said that foods that are rich in fiber or nutrients like magnesium, a mineral that “helps your body turn the switch off so you can relax at night and fall asleep.”
“Many people don’t eat enough magnesium and in studies, people who have insomnia tend to have lower magnesium intake,” Cassetty said. “Plant foods are going to supply you with all those building blocks that our bodies seem to need.”
Other lifestyle changes, like avoiding electronic screens at night and incorporating exercise into your daily routine, can help with sleep.
What Are Natural Habits For Better Sleep
While sleep hacks are great if they work, Dr. Breus believes in making sure to establish good sleep hygiene. He suggests adding these five simple habits to your daily routine to help you get better quality sleep:
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Caffeinated Foods And Beverages
When you think of foods and drinks that give you immediate energy, coffee and other caffeinated products may come to mind.
This is because caffeine is a central nervous system stimulant, meaning it increases feelings of alertness and makes you feel more awake and energized .
Because of this effect, caffeinated foods and beverages, including soda, coffee, caffeinated tea, and caffeinated chocolate products may negatively affect sleep and keep you awake at night.
In fact, research shows that consuming coffee, even many hours before bedtime, can affect sleep. A small 2013 study in 12 people found that consuming 400 mg of caffeine at bedtime, as well as 3 and 6 hours before bed, significantly disrupted sleep.
Interestingly, ingesting 400 mg of caffeine 6 hours before bed more than doubled the time it took for participants to fall asleep and reduced total sleep time by 1 hour, compared with a placebo .
This lack of sleep due to caffeine consumption may lead you to drink a lot of caffeine the next day to counteract feelings of tiredness, which can negatively affect the next nights sleep. Some people refer to this cycle as the coffee cycle .
While some people are very sensitive to caffeine and experience sleep-related issues even if they consume a small amount, others can have caffeinated beverages closer to bedtime without experiencing sleep issues. This is due to genetic variations (
- foods that contain caffeine or coffee as an ingredient, such as tiramisu
What Is Lettuce Tea
Lettuce tea is, sadly, exactly what it sounds like: lettuce leaves steeped in hot water. Some videos show TikTok creators straining the leaves out, while others leave them in a peppermint tea bag is sometimes added to make it taste more refreshing . In many of these videos, someone drinks the tea, makes a few comments about its smell and taste and checks back in 45 minutes later to say that they feel drowsy.
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Can I Use Any Lettuce
Romaine lettuce is highest in lactucin, according to the study mentioned earlier. So if lactucin really helps you sleep, then romaine lettuce would be the best choice. “More research needs to be conducted on other forms of leafy greens such as spinach and arugula which have different plant properties,” Meyer-Jax says.
Can Lettuce Water Actually Help You Sleep
No studies have shown that eating lettuce you buy in the grocery store can help you fall asleep, Dr. Drerup said. But its understandable why people think it might.
Lettuce has been used in folk medicine as a natural sedative and pain reliever for centuries. During the 19th century, for instance, some doctors used lactucarium a dried, hardened form of a bitter, milky juice secreted by wild lettuce as a sedative, or combined lettuce with other ingredients to make dwale, an herbal anaesthetic.
Dr. Drerup said that the TikTok trend may have stemmed from a 2017 Korean study in mice, which she has seen people cite in videos. In the study, researchers reported that after feeding young mice a concentrated extract of lettuce seeds and leaves and pentobarbital , some slept as much as about 20 minutes longer than mice that were fed just the pentobarbital. But Dr. Drerup said that the study had many limitations, including the fact that the lettuce extracts were tested alongside a sleep-inducing drug. Not to mention, mice arent humans. It doesnt really support the hypothesis of the lettuce water doing anything, Dr. Drerup said.
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The Trendy Beverage Brews Lettuce Leaves In Hot Water Just Like Tea
Getting a good night’s sleep is imperative to our everyday health. Sleep makes up a third of every person’s life but Ialong with the 50 to 70 million others in the countrystruggle with easily falling asleep. So when I saw the latest trendy video of someone drinking lettuce water to supposedly help induce sleep making its way around social media, I was intrigued, but skeptical. I’ve tried essential oils, changed my apartment’s temperature, and sipped chamomile tea to help me sleep better, so why hadn’t I heard of lettuce water?
Using herbal teas as a sleep aid has been around for centuries. “Steeping wild grasses and leaves have been part of that nighttime tradition and using Lactuca sativa , technically an herb, is a newer twist on that process,” says Christina Meyer-Jax, RDN and health advisor for Lifesum. In the #lettucewater videos all you have to do is grab some romaine lettuce leaves and cover it with boiling water. Let it wilt for a few minutes, drink up, and you should be getting drowsy enough to fall asleep. Before I drowned my precious salad greens in water, I sought advice from experts to determine whether the hack actually has merit.
Does Drinking It Calm People With Anxiety And Depression
No matter what type of decaffeinated tea you choose, there is evidence that supports the fact that drinking tea will help calm those suffering from anxiety in depression.
There are three reasons why this is the case:
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Tried And Tested Ways To Get Good Sleep
While drinking a cup of lettuce tea at night doesnât seem to come with any negative effects, we canât say for sure whether it will help you sleep.
Lettuce tea might feel like an easy option to improved sleep, but itâs better still to understand why you are struggling to sleep and to address the underlying issues.
Thatâs where Sleepstation can help. We offer a form of whatâs called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for insomnia thatâs administered digitally .
CBTi and DCBTi use a number of techniques to help improve sleep such as sleep restriction, thought blocking and encouraging good sleep hygiene, which are introduced over a number of weeks in the form of an online course.
In both face-to-face and digitally delivered forms, CBTi is:
- not reliant on using chemical means to alter sleep
- based on decades of sound science
- able to give long lasting improvements in sleep in a way that pharmaceuticals donât
- suitable for people with other health issues, such as anxiety or depression.
You can read more about how Sleepstationâs approach is so effective here.
What Does The Science Say About Lettuce Water For Sleep
Unlike many other TikTok trends, there is actually some science behind lettuce as a sleep aid. A study published in May 2017 in the journal Food Science Biotechnology has been heavily cited in support of lettuce water to improve sleep. The study specifically found that some varieties of lettuce extract, specifically red Romaine, induced an increase in the sleep duration of mice at low and high doses.
Michael Breus, PhD, a clinical psychologist and the author of multiple books about sleep, including The Power of When, points out that the study does little to support the hypothesis that lettuce water works as a sleep aid for a variety of reasons.
For one, he notes that lettuce extract isnt what put the mice to sleep to begin with it helped them sleep longer.
These mice were drugged when given the lettuce, he says, pointing out that the mice were injected with a dose of pentobarbital to put the animal to sleep soon after the extract was orally administered.
Furthermore, the study wasnt set up to determine if the lettuce extract actually lessened the time it took the mice to fall asleep it was designed to compare the sleep-inducing effects of green and red leaf lettuces.
All the mice in the study were separated from one another, and the researchers measured how long it took for each mouse to fall asleep and how long each mouse slept . But, any mice that didnt sleep within 15 minutes of the injection were excluded from the final analysis.
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Lettuce May Have An Analgesic Action
Analgesic action refers to the pain-relieving properties of a substance.
A few studies have claimed that lactucopicrin and lactucin have analgesic abilities.
Their administration raised the pain threshold in mice, alluding to their analgesic properties.
In experiments, the administration of lactucin and its ester, 11,13-dihydro-lactucin, was found to produce analgesia in amounts equal to or greater than ibuprofen in mice.
The pain killer effect was present for up to 90 minutes, but the maximal effect was seen 30 minutes after administration of the molecule.
Research on wild lettuce, a lettuce variety that is closely related to the common lettuce, showed that there was a decrease in the enkephalinase enzyme activity, without any activity on opioid receptors, when using lettuce extract.
The inhibition of this enzyme is linked to analgesic action.
Again, it was the lactucin, lactucarium, and 11,13-dihydro-lactucin components of lettuce which were responsible for the analgesic effect.
Lactucin And Lactucopicrin Contents Of Seed Extracts Derived From Lettuce Varieties
Lactuca sativa , an annual herb which belongs to the Compositae family, is known for its medicinal value. Traditionally, lettuce has been suggested to have a sedative-hypnotic property . Lactucopicrin and lactucin are the major active compounds of lactucarium, and were reported to have analgesic activity equal to or greater than that of ibuprofen in mice. They also showed a sedative activity as revealed by measuring the spontaneous movement in mice. Lactucin, a sesquiterpene lactone of the Lactuca species, was reported to have a sedative property in the spontaneous locomotor activity test . The lettuce opium is known to have these analgesic, antitussive, and sedative properties because of the lactucin its ester lactucopicrin has been used in Europe for centuries . However, no analgesic and sedative effect has been reported for lactucopicrin in the other report . Unlike lactucopicrin, lactucin is presumed to be the predominant substance exhibiting the sedative property including sleep-promoting effect.
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Does Lettuce Tea Actually Make You Fall Asleep Faster
We hate to break it to you, but probably not. Though some TikTok creators say that it does help them feel drowsy faster than they normally would, the science isnt so supportive. While there have been a couple studies on the effects of lettuce on sleep, theyve focused on said effects in mice. One study by Korean researchers found that romaine lettuce was an interesting and valuable source of sleep-potentiating material, noting that the extract of green romaine lettuce significantly reduced sleep latency , and increased sleep duration in mice when compared to other lettuces. However, the mice in that particular study were also given a pentobarbital medication and researchers used romaine extract, which is much more concentrated than the lettuce tea youd make at home.
But Does Lettuce Water Really Make You Sleepy
Even though the trend is going viral, there isnt much science to back up the theory. One study published in the journal Food Science and Biotechnologyfound that lettuce contains a range of polyphenols that have antioxidant properties, which may help induce sleep. But this theory requires more research because the study uses rodents as the test subjects and not humans.
Other smaller-scale studies have found that lettuce-derived oil may have sleep-inducing effects on humans. A pilot study that included 60 people published in the International Journal of General Medicine found that lettuce seed oil is successful in promoting sleep in those who experience mild-to-moderate difficulty sleeping. Another study that included 67 children published in the Research Journal of Pharmacognosy found that using lettuce seed oil on a childs forehead and temples at bedtime could improve symptoms associated with sleep disorders. However, larger studies that include a larger, more diverse group of people are needed to confidently confirm the results.
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Lettuce contains lactucin and lactucopicrin, bitter substances which are thought to have sedative effects, explains Jim White, R.D., ACSM-certified exercise physiologist and owner of Jim White Fitness and Nutrition Studios.
So why do TikTokers note feeling tired after trying the trend? Im going with societal factors and the placebo effect, says White. Most likely, its the power of suggestion.
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